Resource system

[dutchfubar]

Hi,
I was wondering if you're going to do something about the resource system. I always found it a bit disappointing that if you don't have any iron in your provinces and such that you still can make highly armoured units. When I read your aims and goals you said that new units can evolve when you capture new provinces. Maybe it would be a nice addition that it also depends on the resources, for example if you capture a province with camels, you can train camel-riding units etc. Next to that it can make the game more tactical, as you can only create your armoured units if you have enough iron etc.

[alpaca]

Yeah, the idea has definitely crossed our minds. We'll see what we're going to do about it, but we'll probably at least have something like making high-level armories dependent on iron in the vicinity.

[Vladimir]

Excellent idea, bringing an idea back from Medieval I. Additionally I would like to see the merchants play a more important role. Instead of a finance driven system add a resource driven aspect to it. If you don't have an iron mine under your control, send a merchant to one. The types of resources within your territory or traded by your merchants should affect what types of goods and services you can produce. MA and AD seem to excel in scripting but this may tax even your abilities. The key, as always, is how to make the AI understand this system, or, make them exempt from it.

[alpaca]

Excellent idea, bringing an idea back from Medieval I. Additionally I would like to see the merchants play a more important role. Instead of a finance driven system add a resource driven aspect to it. If you don't have an iron mine under your control, send a merchant to one. The types of resources within your territory or traded by your merchants should affect what types of goods and services you can produce. MA and AD seem to excel in scripting but this may tax even your abilities. The key, as always, is how to make the AI understand this system, or, make them exempt from it.

Yeah, Re Berengario and I had that idea, too (us already having had all these ideas sounds weird, I know, but we are chock full of the stuff )
In fact, we already developed an idea to script it, too.
The problem is indeed what you mention: The AI will never be made to use it. So we have two ways we could go down here; the first is to scrap the feature, and the second is to make it player-only.

As I'll further explain in this week's preview, we'll be going the second route and implement a lot of our features only for the player, making the game harder for him or her by giving the AI more subtle advantages than the crude money scripts you see floating around.
I call the whole thing "scalable difficulty", because more and more of these features will be unlocked when you move up the difficulty ladder. On very hard, II and AD will definitely be a challenge (this has another reason, too, which has to do with victory conditions but I won't to go into detail right now).

One of our ideas was creating a kind of textile manufacture that you can build and that grants trade bonuses in a certain city as long as you are trading the required resources with a merchant. This will possibly be limited to one per faction, but I'm not sure yet. It'd definitely improve smaller factions' chances.
We'll try to do what we can to make the whole economic part more important, because, as you can probably suss out of our aims&goals thread, we're trying to detract the player from huge-scale conquests whenever possible.

[dutchfubar]

I like the way you approach to modding this game. I have always preferred gameplay realism over historical correctness, so I probably won't play total realism, but I am looking forward to this mod. A question about the campaign AI, what is moddable about it, I haven't really looked into the scripting that much, but is it only a few parameters like agressiveness that you can adjust, or is it possible to make a script that makes decissions for the AI?

[alpaca]

I like the way you approach to modding this game. I have always preferred gameplay realism over historical correctness, so I probably won't play total realism, but I am looking forward to this mod. A question about the campaign AI, what is moddable about it, I haven't really looked into the scripting that much, but is it only a few parameters like agressiveness that you can adjust, or is it possible to make a script that makes decissions for the AI?

Well it's a bit hard to really do it, but in Kingdoms it'll probably be possible because you can assign new AI behaviour sets to factions by script. It could be this is in 1.2, or they could have taken it out again from the leaked patch to final.
Anyways, I haven't really tackled AI yet.